The success of his efforts against the fanatics secured for Luther the favour of his Ruler and his protection against the consequences of his outlawry by the Empire. Luther was thus enabled to carry on his work as professor and preacher at Wittenberg in defiance of the Emperor and the Empire; from thence, till the very end of his life, he was able, unmolested, to spread abroad, with the help of the Press, his ideas of ecclesiastical revolution. In view of the movement just described, and of others of a like nature, he published towards the close of his Patmos sojourn the work entitled “A True Admonition to all Spirits to Avoid Riot and Revolt.”[246] This, however, did not prevent him shortly after from furthering the idea of the use of force with all his habitual incautious violence in the tract “Against the Falsely-called Spiritual Estate of the Pope and the Bishops” (1522),[247] in which, in language the effect of which upon the masses it was impossible to gauge, he incites the people to overthrow the existing Church government. “Better were it,” he cries in the latter work, “that all bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted out, than that one soul should suffer. What then must we say when all souls are lost for the sake of vain mummery and idols? Of what use are they but to live in pleasure on the sweat and toil of others and to hinder the Word of God?” A revolt against such tyrants could not, he says, be wicked; its cause would not be the Word of God, but their own obstinate disobedience and rebellion against God. “What better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt? Such a thing, should it occur, would only give cause for laughter, as the Divine Wisdom says, Proverbs i. 25-26: ‘You have despised all my counsel and have neglected my reprehensions. I also will laugh in your destruction.’”[248] Expressing similar sentiments, the so-called “Bull of Reformation,” comprised in the last-mentioned tract, has it that “all who assist in any way, or venture life or limb, goods or honour in the enterprise of destroying bishoprics and exterminating episcopal rule, are dear children of God and true Christians.... On the other hand all who hold with the rule of the bishops ... are the devil’s own servants.”[249] Such is the teaching of “Ecclesiastes, by the Grace of God,” as Luther calls himself here and frequently elsewhere. They must listen to him; the bishops, for the sake of their idol the Pope, abused, condemned and consigned to the flames him and his noble cause, refusing either to listen to or to answer him, but now he will, so he says, “put on his horns and risk his head for his master,” in defiance of the “idolatrous, licentious, shameless, accursed seducers and wolves.” As a demolisher Luther proved himself great and strong. Was he an equally good builder? * * * * *